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Cricket in Sri Lanka

by Sir Garfield Sobers

This was an article which appeared in the book "50: A Beginning", published for the 50th birthday of late Mr. Gamini Dissanayake.

I first met Gamini Dissanayake in Melbourne when he was visiting Australia on an official tour in August 1981. I was informed by the Protocol Office of the Australian Government that a visiting Sri Lankan Minister wished to meet with me.

It was quite an enigma to me as to what a Sri Lankan Minister wants to do with me. Inquiries from the Protocol Officer that I was requested call back, could not give me an explanation. Alright I said, I will be happy to see him. The next day the officer telephoned me again.

She told me that the visiting Minister was the President of the Board of Control for Cricket in Sri Lanka and that was probably the reason he wanted to meet me. Aha! I thought, it was the old cricket thing again that was catching up on me, for by now, with age catching up, I have paved away into golf which by now had addicted me and I found the involvement with golf absorbing and exhilarating.

I had some contact with cricket by way of running a Cricket School for young kids. This way I was giving back to cricket which had given me so much, something in return. Sharing their enthusiasm and thrills sometimes brought back some old memories of my journey up the ladder of international cricket.

I looked forward to see Gamini Dissanayake. When I met him at the prestigious Wentworth Hotel in Melbourne where the government was hosting him, he immediately put me at ease and came straight to the point.

"Sir Garfield", he said stretching his hand out, "I am Gamini Dissanayake, I was looking forward to meet you so that we can invite you to Sri Lanka to coach our Test squad some of the more mature aspects of Test Cricket." I said I was honoured to be so considered and sat down for a discussion with him.

His very charming wife Srima was with him and if I remember correctly, there were two or three friends of his from his old school now settled down in Australia. I was introduced to them Laxman Karunatilaka, I learnt, lived in the same neighbourhood of Glen Waverly where I lived. I had met Arden Perkins, a friend of his from school, days earlier.

Caribbean

I discussed the possibility of an assignment in Sri Lanka with him over dinner. I was very surprised about his detailed knowledge of almost every aspect of the game. He was clear however on one aspect that he was putting together a good Cricket administration and to develop on the players a psychological foundation of the game.

At one stage, I asked him at what level he had played cricket, "Not for the West Indies" was the very quick response. I met him again on two more occasions before he left Melbourne. By that time I had firmly decided to travel to Sri Lanka and accept a coaching assignment.

A few fax messages to and fro about the terms of my assignment, and I arrived in Sri Lanka in 1982. I was met at the Airport by senor Cricket Board officials who deposited me "safely" in the Australian High Commission guest house at Guildford Crescent.

This way to be my home for over three months and I soon initiated a series of working sessions with the pool of Sri Lankan cricketers both at the nets and the Board headquarters.

Talent

My assessment of Sri Lanka's cricket and cricketers is perhaps relevant at this stage. Sri Lanka has enormous cricket talent and there seems to be no limit to its future development. They seem to combine something of the Caribbean spirit of Cricket coming from their own nature and at the same time bound by a very traditional approach to the game.

This I suspected was due to extremely rigorous and orthodox cricket coaching at school level, although Sri Lanka had what I thought was one of the best school coaching systems among the Test playing nations.

The interim period between school cricket or club cricket and international Test cricket can be a long and a painful one. It appeared to me that Gamini Dissanayake was one of the very few in the Sri Lankan Cricket administration who realised this.

Most of the administrators generally thought that the world of international competitive cricket was to be an easy path progressing from strength to strength and even victory to victory. No one who has played Test cricket would share that optimism.

Gamini Dissanayake and a few in the Cricket administration were realists and therefore they tried to infuse some of my experience, knowledge and reading of the game into a young and unblooded team venturing out into the cruel world of highly competitive Test cricket. Gamini Dissanayake was pushing me to a convert his crop of young, talented and promising sportsmen to develop a professional outlook to the game. This I tried very hard to do.

Politics

Cricket administrations all over the world are notorious for their divisions. Sri Lanka was no exception. Gamini Dissanayake was holding the scales between these different groups. He did more. He somehow managed to make them work together.

He confided in me about his problems. "Gary" he once told me "I find it easier to run two ministries and a trade union than the Cricket Board. "He may have been right. In Sri Lanka most of the administrative work was done by volunteers either for the love of the game or through a sheer commitment.

In such a context most assert their individuality and independence and their lack of cohesiveness can spill over to affect the players adversely. The players, very often the Captain and the senior players find themselves sucked into the vortex of cricket politics.

For most of them Gamini Dissanayake was confidante, the one who insulated them from clashes of personalities and the one who gave them a vision to excel themselves to greater and greater heights. I found it incredible how he found the time for them.

On one occasion Gamini Dissanayake handed over to me an invitation from the country's President, J. R. Jayewardene to dine with him and his wife. I was pleasantly surprised to realise that apart from Gamini Dissanayake and wife Srima I was the only other guest. President Jayewardene was a cultured and refined man who knew much about cricket.

I learnt that he too had been the head of the cricket administration once and had during that time got down Leary Constantine of the West Indies for a short spell to Sri Lanka. He had read widely on cricket and he referred to Ranjith Singhji as the "Prince of a small state but the King of a Greate Game." I realised that Gamini Dissanayake was moving ahead with Sri Lanka cricket partly because of his own dynamism but also because of the great support he was receiving from the "old gent" as Gamini called him.

Suddenly out of the blues he asked me "Sir Garfield how did you score so much in your day, how did you go on and on?" I looked at Mrs. Jayewardene, a very gracious lady, who was waiting for the answer.

I had been well entertained that night and therefore I thought the question deserved a forthright answer. "Sir" I said "after I get my eye in I see the ball coming at me as big as a football. Therefore nothing gets me out, unless I throw my wicket away. "Sir Garfield" he said "can't you make our boys develop such an eye?" and he laughed aloud. It was a memorable evening.

The "boys" were really good. But they had a long way to go as a team. Sidath Wettamuni, Duleep Mendis, Roy Dias, Arjuna Ranatunga, Ranjan Madugalle, Rumesh, Ravi Ratnayake and Aravinda de Silva were under any circumstances world class cricketers.

They could compete with the best and left to themselves they have potential to develop and go beyond the frontiers to be, all time greats. But cricket does not exist in a vacuum. It has to develop side by side with other things and I realized while I was in Sri Lanka that a country's situation in general had much to do with this process.

Apartheid

To begin with Sri Lanka was hit with the South African issue. It broke up the team as it was emerging and this greatly disturbed Gamini Dissanayake.

It was a very unfortunate development at the time and the big question mark was will this ever happen again? Each time you develop a team, will the inevitable reprisals dismember what has already been built? There was also the complex issues of the International Cricket Conference which adopted a strong stand on the question of Apartheid and Sri Lanka had to face this situation alongside India, Pakistan, the West Indies and the rest of the International Cricket community. There was no solution at that time.

Fortunately, now the crisis is over and South Africa is back in the ICC. It was the political evolution of South Africa that finally decided the issue and I am glad that it is all over now.

The second factor was the internal civil conflict in the country which led to less and less international teams touring Sri Lanka. I met the Sri Lankan team at international tournaments once in Sharjah and again in Australia. I was sad to hear that hardly any international side had toured Sri Lanka in recent times. It is not possible to progress without international exposure.

It is exposure to diverse conditions and experience which made artistes out of players such as Imran Khan, Javed Miandad, Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev in the Asian Sub-continent itself.

I have no doubt that Sri Lanka will emerge as a cricketing force in time to come. Nothing will hold her back. There is too much talent out there. It will come. It will come in time.

I am happy to have been associated with the beginning of a process. The time I spent in Sri Lanka were well spent. I met many fine people and some of them were not in the cricketing world.

One of the finest I had the pleasure and privilege of coming to know was Gamini Dissanayake. What he has done for Sri Lanka cricket will become more visible and appreciated with the passage of time. Thanks to Gamini Dissanayake I came to be involved with Sri Lanka cricket.

Cricket itself is an unending culture. Sri Lankan cricketers will undoubtedly mould that culture to suit their own in time to come. I suspect they are already doing it. I do not know whether their "guide, philosopher and friend" at that time Gamini Dissanayake is any longer involved in the administration of cricket. It is my perception however that he has done for them what few others could do.

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